i'm toure. look who's talking. president obama and speaker boehner. they had a weekend rendezvous at the white house. taxes, spending cuts. i'm susan in for s.e. today. michigan's governor driving the motor city in to a fight over the unions. why's the president playing backseat driver? i'm steve kornacki. there's outrage maybe even criminal charges coming in that death of the nurse in england. wait a minute. are we being too hard on the pranksters? >> i'm krystal ball. in to the holiday spiritual. our friend is back at the table with tips to dare we say it enjoy the season? all and that a federal case of it. why when it comes to gay marriage the train can't be stop. neither can we. it's "the cycle" and it's monday, december 10th.

it's monday, fun day here at "the cycle." let's get the party started. where will it land today? fiscal cliff? huh. so much for fun. well you know what? we at "the cycle" can make it fun. look at this. the president living it up in motown last hour calling on republicans to stop being party poopers. >> i believe america only succeeds and thrives when we've got a strong and growing middle class. i want us to bring down our deficits but i want to do it in a balanced, responsible way. and i want to reward -- i want a tax code that rewards businesses and manufacturers, like detroit diesel right here creating jobs right here in redford, right here in michigan. right here in the united states of america. >> rhetoric like that might be working. look at the headline today. end game approaching as it's

looking more and more likely that the republicans forced to give in on taxes. house speaker john boehner after a secret white house meeting this weekend says the lines of communication between both sides remain open. but what would the gop demand for a concession on taxes and how much leverage do they have left? let's bring back dr. jay john allen for politico. how are you, sir? >> doing very well. i was concerned about the wheel of misfortune there on the fiscal cliff. >> i'm worried about it, too. but let's talk about that. how much leverage do the republicans have? we know that the president has leverage because elections matter but what kind of leverage do the republicans have? >> i think the president wants to get this taken care of, not worry about a debt ceiling in the future and the republicans with their effort in that debate and some negotiating room for the republicans. they would like to see serious

entitlement reforms or a movement in that direction and a system set up to try to do major tax reform. i think some of that may happen. we are seeing some democrats show some willingness to tinker around with medicare and social security perhaps. >> john, we can't top talking about the cliff negotiation that's all we've been talking about lately and i have something to bring to the table about that. keep rolling up right there. we're stuck between clifs and it makes me think about the great outdoors and pictures boehner between a rock and a hard place. i want to bring back the movie metaphor club with boehner's position and the precarious position of rolston the climatic moment of the film "120 hours" with james franco trapped by a boulder for 127 hours and then accepting that in order to survive, he must cut off his arm. he begins cutting, not for the squeamish.

jonathan, you may call it gross but i see it as a triumph of human spirit. once he realizes he has no way out but the will to survive. he amputates a part of himself to live. this is john boehner right now trapped between two boulders. stubborn party and the power of the president. do you think boehner's realized to cut off a part of himself, this need to not raise taxes in order to survive so in this way he's choosing political life? >> look. some people would look at and particularly some republicans would look at boehner doing just that as survivalism. a whole knotter faction of the republican party look at that and call it unilateral

disarmament, literally. he's navigating a treacherous path. >> can you weigh in more specifically on cutting his arm off? the viewers want to know. >> they do. >> i just gave you unilateral disarmament. >> that was pretty good. you're right. >> part of his soul to cut off for this deal. >> i think republicans are starting to realize they won't get everything they want, they don't have a lot of leverage and the longer this goes on the more pain for them and trying to kind a way out of it. i don't know that i would liken it to sawing his own arm off. perhaps getting a bad hair cut and coming back and waiting a few more months to grow out or something. look. it looks like there's a deal on taxes. the president has said that taxes will go up on the wealthy. he holds the trump card in that and nothing gets done that will happen. >> well, you know, jonathan, it's funny you say that the republicans may be recognizing they don't have the leverage here but trying to assert some

leverage by saying that they'll do another sort of debt ceiling showdown and not satisfied with the outcome this month, the debt ceiling probably a month later, early february and saying they want to have another showdown if necessary over that. the official position of the white house is we're not going down that road again. we are not going to be negotiating and hostage games over this. however, there was a report on friday from ezra klein saying that this is not anything they're talking about publicly but the conversation within the white house is about the idea of giving in to republicans on raising the eligibility age for medicare, raising that two years in exchange for a partial increase on the top marginal tax rate to 37% instead of 39.6% obama is asking for. that idea, horrifying the left. it does not poll very well. it actually doesn't do much from a budget tear standpoint but i think people say it's powerfully

symbolic for the republicans to get that concession sen if this is something that the white house is willing to explore does this not suggest they're very concerned about the leverage of the republicans with the debt ceiling and pressure to give in in a real way here? >> i think there's desire on the part of the president to increase social security. while the public would like to both strengthen the two programs and never change them, that's not really possible. so, i think if the white house was able to make some reforms that they could agree to, that they think will actually help the long-term sustainability of the programs, and will also help get republicans on board to vote for something that not only increases taxes on the wealthy and also takes the debt ceiling debate off the table i think that they're going to look for ways to do that. if the president is seen in his legacy as somebody who made medicare and social security stronger, that's a heck of an

incentive to negotiate. >> i think in terms of republican leverage, i'm referring to specifically if the republicans decide to play games with the debt ceiling again, the work around out there for the white house and ignore this, to invoke the 14th amendment to the constitution and basically say we'll keep on like nothing happened here but the white house ruled that out. they said we won't take the 14th amendment option. and it seems to me that that leaves them with -- open to the exact same kind of blackmail we saw in 2011. >> i think it may leave them open to that blackmail if they don't get a deal done now. i'm not sure that the president lost a lot in the last round. there was all this talk about the leverage of the republicans and the spending cuts at some level and what cost to the republicans? the president won re-election. this was not something that -- may have hurt the economy and something republicans blamed for. look at the numbers. terrible. not just only as a party but

particularly in congress right now. you know, this is not -- this is not a long-term winning game i don't think for republicans to hold up every agreement claiming leverage where they don't have it. i think they need to find in order to do better areas they have got more public support than they seem to have on the issues. 60% according to a new politi politico/george washington university poll believes the top should have an increase in taxes. fighting the public and appear to be ideological doesn't seem to work. certainly didn't in terms of knocking president obama off. >> one thing that also didn't work in 2011 was the president ab do kating the role to nancy pelosi and harry reid. this time around, maybe because he feels he has the mandate, he's doing the negotiations straight on with boehner which i

think leads to a better result. this is an overall different approach in his leadership whether it's because he's thinking legacy or anything? should we expect to see this level of leadership going forward? >> i think he tried to make a deal with boener in 2011. we know he was close to a deal with boehner and then the gang of six with the plan more aggressive. sort of a bigger deal and the president sort of balked at the agreement. seemed to be putting in to place with boehner and then boehner walked away, as well, and the whole thing fell apart. i think you have seen an acknowledgment. if the president and boehner come to an agreement then the senate will come along, the house democrat wills come along. a number of them will. these are really the key negotiators and has to be done at that level to get something finished. >> jonathan, i have to say i'm a little bit skeptical about one aspect of this. it looks like we're closer and

closer to a deal where rates rise. so conservative republicans will be asked to raise rates, something that's been anath ma to the party and the far right wing. and then you guys are reporting over at politico the next battle is going to be immigration reform. where they're likely to be asked to support what many of them would have sort of offensively and wrongly called amnesty for illegals. isn't there a revolt on the right in the house republican caucus in particular? >> i certainly think that there is possibly some carryover effect of one issue to the next, particularly if the right feels like it's not treating well. i think the key is if you see an immigration deal coming together in the senate, if you see something to get 60 votes in the senate in the next congress and where the president focuses attention. you will probably get the votes that you need in the house to get that done. i think the republican party's pretty badly divided on immigration and increasingly

seeing leading lights of the republican party and conservatives, including people harsher on immigration matters in the past starting to say, look, we have to come up with a solution to this problem. it is not enough to just talk about it but something to come to the table, get something done and not be seen as intransigent on that. i think the immigration has as good a chance as it has any time in the past half dozen years. they were very, very close in the senate. president obama voted for a poison pill that took down a promising senate bill at the time. now he's coming back saying he wants to get it done. >> dr. jay talking politics as smooth as a lay-up. thank you for visiting with us. >> my pleasure. take care. up next, a big development of president obama's trip to michigan today. the president steps in to a nasty statewide battle between the governor and big labor. why now? why not wisconsin? "the cycle" rolls on.

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today the president injected himself in to one of the nation's most heated debates coming out against right to work laws in the labor capital of michigan. those laws are deemed by critics as union killers. >> right to work laws, they don't have to do with economics. they have everything to do with politics. what they're really talking about is giving you the right to work for less money. what we shouldn't be doing is trying to take away your rights to bargain for better wages and

working conditions. >> hey, it only took him four years in office to say it. here's candidate obama back in 2007. >> understand this. if american workers are being denied their right to organize and collectively bargain when i'm in the white house i'll put on a comfortable pair of shoes myself. i'll walk on that picket line with you as president of the united states. >> why did the president pick now to so voluntary valley insert himself in this issue? let's put it splu the spthrough cycle. i think it's about politics. like wisconsin, which he completely ignored. again, for political reasons. so, the way i sigh it is right now he's focusing on the fiscal cliff. he will have to give in on entitlement issues and up to him to focus on how to make the left

happy and do something with labor. a natural constituency. it will come after him if he doesn't do something about it. i think right now good politics on the issue. >> yeah, no. i tend to agree with that. he just has to show up. he wasn't as in the speech today as sort as explicit as i was led to believe this morning and the white house made it clear where he stands on this. i'm fascinated, also, by the politics of this within michigan and when's happening in michigan because this law which, you know, the final vote in the legislature will be tomorrow and the expectation is the republican governor will sign it and changes the political culture and just the working culture of michigan. talk about the right to work laws used to be just south carolina, used to be the old confederacy. to have it spread to the rust belt is dramatic. the story is governor rick snyder, republican governor, hard to believe now but when he was elected he was celebrated by the national media as the

anti-tea party republican. campaign as a nerd, not so much ideological. he wasn't going to do the kinds of things in michigan that john kay sich was doing in ohio and the turning point when labor in michigan tried to put a constitutional amendment -- put a constitutional amendment on the ballot out there he took as an affront and he snider in response is receptive to this legislation but i think what's interesting to watch here just quickly in the next day is this. a group of democratic congressmen and leaders of michigan met to meet with snyder. the approval rating is not high. facing re-election in what's a blue state in 2014 and basically said, look, this is a huge political mess for you. you are taking incredible flack from supporters like the detroit news, newspapers. here's the way out for you. one of two things. this bill's going to pass the legislature tod

legislature tomorrow and they put in appropriation to be exempt from referendum. they said line item veto and let the voters decide or there will be an amendment offered yesterday for a referendum. get behind the amendment. sign sit but you're out on this to keep from the fight maybe that you had with scott walker in wisconsin is let the voters decide this. >> what's interesting is the governor said, please, to the republican party, please do not put this bill on my desk. he really didn't want to be in this position to start off with so tomorrow will be very interesting. >> well, sort of bigger national political story behind the anti-union, anti-labor movement is also fascinating because, yes, republicans tend to have an ideological anti-union, anti-labor stance, but there's also more cynical political motive here. putting up the top ten list of donors of 2012, see the top ones there. all corporations.

not giving to democrats. and in the next group you can see the national education association, the uaw, the seiu, a couple of unions breaking in there. they're the only groups with money to compete at all with the corporation givers who give largely to republicans. so when republicans are taking on the unions, when they're forcing decline in membership and what right to worker as the president puts it right to work for less, i happen to like that phrasing, it causes union membership to decline and less money for political action and there's a cynical political motive and i just want to put this all in perspective. if we could put the chart back up that was just on the screen. as union membership declined in this country, right along with it, middle class share of the income has declined. and i know the story is not that simple. but the decline of labor in this country has been a very

important piece of the story of the decline of the middle class and rising inequality in the country. paul krugman has an article talking about profits as a share of national economy surging while the share of national income going to labor through wages and other composition is declining so union rights major major part of that story. >> nomenclature issue is important here. typical republican naming of things. right to work please. this is the right to not join the union that made the workplace better. when you join a workplace, the union made improvements to the situation you may not even realize or notice at that point. they'll protect you in the future from things you don't know are forthcoming in the future so i mean to allow people to join a workplace where they don't have to pay to join the union but they get the benefits of being in that workplace is totally sort of backwards. i mean, look. this is happening i think partly because we're after the election. right? and the unions were huge in

helping obama get elected. he owes them something. i don't totally look at it sin cli for the future but once again the party of the wealthy is against the regular man. things that regular working class people need laying the groundwork for defeat in 2016. party i.d., a long-term sorts of thing that is will just remind people, hey, they're not for us. they're not working for us. 2016 is already begun and not too cool to not -- i'm not too cool to talk about it already. it's begun and the republicans are working toward losing it. >> i don't know if it's working toward losing it but there's an image problem coming out of the 2012. no doubt about it but same time people rather have a job than losing the job outsourcing overseas. straight ahead -- >> people have to want to invite you in for dinner and right now you and your wife are in the doorway three feet apart letting

in the cold air. that's why you lost iowa. it's why you'll lose new hampshire. >> you are? >> olivia. pope. >> damage control olivia pope does it on "scandal." we have chris lahane who worked for the clintons and got to be good or at least really experienced. anncr: some politicians seem to think medicare and... social security are just numbers in a budget. well, we worked hard for those benefits. we earned them. and if washington tries to cram decisions about the future... of these programs into a last minute budget deal... we'll all pay the price. aarp is fighting to protect seniors with responsible... solutions that strengthen medicare and... social security for generations to come. we can do better than a last minute deal... that would hurt all of us.

oh. >> oh no. >> rod? >> you sent this e-mail reply all. you hit reply all. >> no! aah! aah! ugh. aah! give me -- aah! >> you know i was wrong. you just sent this e-mail to me. could you imagine? >> kornacki does that like every

day. we have had that e-mail nightmare thinking did i just hit reply all and should i send an e-mail out i'm moving to bora bora? a corporation dealing with disaster and politician caught with the wrong person, how do you deal with it and save your reputation? if you're in trouble the first call should be to the guy in the guest spot, chris lahane, master of disaster. he's co-authored a book by that name, "masters of disaster: the ten commandments of disaamage control." >> how are you? >> good, good. >> when you say, not if but when you get in trouble, you give us ten commandments to follow. when's the most important thing to do when you get in trouble? >> when you find yourself in that hole, the first thing you should not do is bring the backhoe in and keep digging.

time and time again, it seems like such common sense that individuals, corporations, the guy in the cubicle that hit reply all in the hole and keep on digging. and so, you have to recognize that the end of the day people understand that bad things will happen. they evaluate you by how you handle it going forward. prospectively from the situation. >> okay. give me -- two case studies. give me somebody in public life that ran in to trouble and handled it perfectly and dodged a bullet or didn't make it worse and somebody who got in to trouble and handled it horribly and made things worse and worse for themselves. >> sure. i'll give two wooshashington, d.c.-based examples. the first one is general petraeus. now, he didn't handle it flawlessly but some of the basic things right. right? so first of all, recognized he was in the hole. stopped digging. he went out there. he disclosed. held himself accountable. took responsibility. he apologized and then he made sure he shut up and did not

continue to talk about it. i think he's put himself in a position where he could sort of follow the eliot spitzer project ri and a long-term recovery and he's put himself in that position because he did not lie about the situation after it has happened and you compare that t situation, highly embarrassed and problematic, something that's survival if he had dealt with it in a more forthright manner from the very beginning. his undoing is the fact that he continued to lie about the actions after the fact and put himself in the position where people really evaluated him from the trust perspective and came to the conclusion they could not trust him going forward because of how he handled the situation after the fact. if you take those two, still very concrete and extreme examples, most people are not going to find themselves in those types of situations but they each took a different path and general petraeus, he has a chance to put in place a

long-term comeback plan whereas i think congressman wei 234e ner to someone out of a job. >> looking forward and politics angle, i read recently something that you said in an interview. modern day presidential campaigns are in effect a protracted exercise in damage control where the winning candidate is the candidate best able to handal series of external and internal crises in way that is communicates to voters that the candidate is trustworthy. does it just boil down to that running for president? anything else matter or just because of our news cycle that they're always reacting to something else? >> so we live in an information age where there's so much information out there, particularly for elected politicians. they're in hd high definition world all the time and most

competitive presidential campaigns, political campaigns, are effectively a character compare and contrast and at the center of that is the issue of trust. that has always been the case in this day and age. more so than ever before and because of how intensely the campaigns are covered and people adversaries to push information out there and because at the end of the day it is about trust, these campaigns really do become a series of how does the candidate handle a particularly crisis and i as a swing voter extrapolate from that? do they handle it in a way that i believe they're worthy of the public trust? look at governor romney with a series of situations in this campaign. a campaign where in theory given where the economy was, was a campaign for him to potentially lose. he did a good job of losing it handling any number of crises, in particular the 47%, the tax returns. both situations where he did not handle his particular crisis in a way that voters come away saying, okay, he made a mistake

but i trust him. he's trustworthy person. he found himself in the hole, kept on digging and i think really created serious problems of trust for himself, particularly with the swing voters to win. >> still digging, actually. >> i think brought a fleet of backhoes. >> chris, i want to ask you about a sort of famous moment of damage control i'm curious about abe you had an up close and personal view of. gore versus bush. the weekend before the election in 2000 when the revelation about george w. bush from when he was 30 years old in 1970s in the d you i, that came out, i think the friday before the election. and bush confronted it. he was at an event. i think in wisconsin said, you know, i have a quote here. i made some mistakes. occasionally drank too much and learned my lesson. i wondered this. i remember the 2000 campaign that george w. bush leading in the polls for october for the

popular vote. the weekend before the election was bush would win the popular vote. could he win the electoral vote and then what happened was the opposite. gore won the popular vote. the supreme court assist, all that stuff. i wonder was this an example of good or bad damage control? do you look back and say there's doubts about bush and couldn't put them to rest? >> yeah. the episode itself documents that it's not a question of if something's going to come out but when something's going to come out, particularly a high profile person running in that campaign. maine is not las vegas. what happens in maine doesn't necessarily stay in maine in that particular situation. i definitely believe as someone on the ground, you know, in that campaign that that revelation late in the cycle days before the election had a significant impact on that very small and devicisive group of voters undecided going in to election day and apropos of what we were talking about.

that to me went to a direct trust issue. people trying to choose between al gore and george w. bush and here's the issue of trust questions. i certainly think that the bush campaign then governor bush could have handled this much, much, much earlier in the cycle and really inoculated themselves against it and potentially ended up in a very different situation but i do think and a lot of data out there to reinforce that and this particular incident played a huge factor in al gore winning the popular vote and clearly had a huge impact on how people perceive that election and clearly manager to be handled in a different way. look at the current president who had admissions of prior drug use right front and center in the book. head held high. talked about it on the perspective of a young person going through the issues and no impact on his candidacy for the president. >> absolutely right. thank you very much, chris. >> thanks for having me. straight ahead, folks in need of crisis management. the australian radio deejays.

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some laxatives like dulcolax can cause cramps. but phillips' caplets don't. they have magnesium. for effective relief of occasional constipation. thanks. [ phillips' lady ] live the regular life. phillips'. there's not a minute that goes by we don't think of that family and what they must be going through and the thought we may have played a part in that is -- it's gut wrenching. if we played any involvement in -- in her death then we're very sorry for that. >> those are the two australian deejays in tears speaking for the first time in a series of tv interviews and apologizing for prank calling the hospital where kate middleton was recovering from morning sickness. the nurse that answered that call was found dead days later and the show has been canceled. prank calls of any kind suspended company wide. the deejays say they have

received death threats since the incident and explain they didn't make the final call in airing the prank. >> it's not up to us to make that decision. we just record it. and then it goes to the other departments to work it out. >> our role is just to record and get the audio and then, you know, wait to be told whether it's okay or not okay and act upon as we're told. >> the hospital in the middle of the scandal today said it will launch a memorial fund for the nurse an demanding action against the deejays. british police contacted australian counterparts and may insist on an investigation. the death of the nurse is certainly a tragedy. are we being too tough on the deejays? let's back spin on it. that's kind of a loaded question there. look. there's obviously plenty of responsibility here in terms of the deejays. they made a prank call. you never know when you make a prank call how someone will react to it.

it would appear here -- i should say nbc news right now all nbc news is characterizing the nurse's death is as a death. that's lots of speculation out there that this was a suicide but right now nbc news is just calling this a death. that's all we can say at this point. the implication is that this was a suicide. and i look at this and i'm of two minds here because, you know, these sort of a.m. drive, you know, pranks by disk jockey teams, australia, great britain or here in the united states, they happen all the time. i've seen some cruel ones. i remember one when i was in boston as a freshman in college, two deejays in boston did a whole elaborate news report that the saying that the may why are of boston was killed in a car accident and before verifying it instantly and half of boston it seemed for a few hours they believed that the mayor died and the mayor filed a complaint with the fcc. my point is looking at this what was involved with this one, say

you shouldn't be doing that no matter what but looking at this and compare it to the other prank calls, two deejays calling the hospital with crude british accidents and, you know, i don't -- i have trouble coming down so hard on them because how could you have thought it would lead to something like this? >> pranks are playing with fire. whatever you do, whatever happens from it, you're responsible. you have to control the situation of the prank. that's why i look back at "punk'd" so genius and controlled so you couldn't hurt yourself or image too much or somebody else too much. these people put somebody in peril, didn't let them know like we're kidding. and i think that they have to deal with the responsibility for what happened. >> yeah, but when you talk about they put them in peril, compared to all of the dozens upon dozens of other shock jocks we hear out there, the question is was it because it's the royal family the reaction as such or how to

punish them. we hear the people saying, oh, they should be jailed. we should take them off the air. i think it's actually a societial punishment coming down to this issue because it's what we dictate. it's the outcome, this tragic outcome that makes it so much horerible. what happens if nothing happened? would you care so much? >> i don't think they should be jailed. you know? i think clearly they're very distraug distraught. they have lost their show. their lives are not good but i also don't think you can abdicate any personal responsibility for them and sort of reminds me of cases of bullying and one in particular came to mind and again i should say we don't know that it's a suicide, we don't know that it was connected to the prank. but i recall that student at rutgers who was secretly recorded by his roommates kissing another man. it was live streamed and he committed suicide. did the kids who were recording him think that he would commit

suicide? of course not. but are they completely off the hook in terms of personal responsibility? also of course not. now, they're not exactly parallel but there's a similarity here in that you're -- they humiliated the woman. they didn't think through what the implications for her and her family would be and responsibility to bear for that. >> all right. well, if this conversation got you a little down, never fear. deepak is here. to talk about happiness at the holidays and beyond. that is next. [ female announcer ] born from the naturally sweet monk fruit, something this delicious could only come from nature. now from the maker of splenda sweeteners, discover nectresse. the only 100% natural, no-calorie sweetener

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holidays are certainly upon us. in fact, 80 feet and 30,000 led lights as evidenced right outside our window right now. we are smack in the middle of the holiday madness here at 30 rock and this time of year can be magical but for many it's also the most stressful time of year so if your wish is to live the spirit of the season, it does not take a christmas miracle. only takes some simple steps from our own spiritual guru deepak chopra back at the table with us, co-author of "super brain: unleashing the explosive power of your brain for health, happiness and spiritual well being." thank you for joining us. >> thank you, krystal. >> now as a mom for me it's not so much stress of conflict with the family but i feel like as a

mom i have to deliver the goods literally and figuratively for my daughter to make it as magical for her as it was for me as a child and then you also get in to, you know, your friends and co-workers and getting them the right gift and what's my relationship status with this person and are they going to get me something? all of that sort of weighs me down in the holiday season. how do we navigate those aspects without sort of getting bogged down? >> one of the points that rudy who's a professor of neuro science of harvard medical school and i make in this book is conscious brain cannot multitask. if you're speaking to me and checking your e-mail at the same time on your iphone, you're doing neither. based on this, we think you have to really slice your time. which is sleep time. exercise time. relationship time with your daughter. and then all of the other things, you know, focused work

time. which you're doing right now. if you do that, and you say there's play time, there's relationship time, there's sleep time, there's exercise time you won't get stressed. when you do get stressed, just stop and this is my formula. it's actually an acronym. stop. take a few deep breaths. observe your body and smile everywhere. from head to toe. and then proceed with consciousness, love, compassion. >> but there's a crisis happening around the there's crs around the holidays. we've made something of ourselves. we've run for congress or have a tv show or what have you. you get back with your family and everybody aks like you did when you were teenagers -- >> because your brain goes back to old memories. >> and you hate to get back into those old emotional dynamics. how do you deal with being smooshed back into the box. >> you have to be conscious it's

going to happen. it happens to everyone. everything kind of reinforces that. the music, the red colors, the christmas colors, the memories come back and the neural networks start to refire. you stop and say what is my goal here. i'm with my family. what is my goal here? it is to be happy. and if that's your goal, then the fastest way you can be happy is to make everyone else happy and you don't have to actually give them gifts. you have to give them attention, which means listen to them, show them a little appreciation for all the things that they represent in your life, and affection. that's it and then give them the gift, too. >> those are really proactive things. i'm wondering what are some of the myths or some of the trappings we all find ourselves falling into this time of year that we should just debunk right now. >> the myths are that, you know, this is the way it is. and it doesn't have to be. it's a reactive response. we become bundles of conditioned reflexes and nerves and we then

get triggered by people and circumstance into predictable outcomes year after year after year. one definition of neurosis is to keep going the same thing and expect a different result. so you have to just step back and observe and say, there's a better way to do it. >> quickly, deepak, how do i get a super brain? >> well, we now know that every experience that we have, there's a representation in the brain. i have talked about the mind/body connection for 30 years, but before you can have a mind/body connection, you need a mind/brain connection. so we know we have an instinctive brain, an emotional brain, and we have an intellectual brain and we need all three. the instinctive brain for survival, the emotional brain for relationship, and the intellectual brain to solve some of the big mysteries of our existence, also for intuition, insight, inspiration, creativity, and choice making. now we can see on a functional

mri which thoughts, which feelings, and which images in your own mind are represented in the brain, it's literally possible to rewire your brain so that you enjoy health, happiness, spiritual insight. i wouldn't have done this book by myself. had i not met rudy who is a professor at harvard medical school, the director at the genetics lab at mass general, i said to him, rudy, is the brain a noun or a verb, and, you know, basically is it a structure or is it an activity that's changing by the second? depending on every flicker of thought. and he thought for a minute and he said it's a verb. i said let's write a book about it. >> amazing stuff. thank you so much. and happy holidays to you. >> and to you. and to you. and thanks for having me. >> our pleasure. up next, toure has a lot of love for the supreme court, so we've got some supremes singing about love. you see what i did there? eat good fats.

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if you live together for 42 years and you love each other all those years and take care of each other all those years, how could marriage be different? it turns out it's different and you don't know why. it has a magic word which is magic throughout the world. it's so hard to say why it matters, why marriage is different, but marriage is different. it has to do with our dignity altogether, our dignity as human beings, and our being able to be who we are openly. >> this is the story of ed.ie

and anthony, two people destined to be together, so to speak. edie married thea in toronto after a 40-year relationship. edie got a federal estate tax bill for $363,000 because the defense of marriage act requires the federal government to treat edie and thee as strangers. if thea had been tom, it would have been zero. several lower courts found doma unconstitution and it was just a matter of train before edie and the freight train that is the movement woot encounter anthony, aka anthony kennedy. when the supremes get down to assessing doma, we can expect the conservatives to defend doma

and the liberals to strike it down. the comp significance of the majority will be determined by the votes of chief justice roberts who has shown he's willing to leave the conservatives if he feels the court's legacy is in peril and kenne kennedy. he wrote the constitution prohibits laws singling out a certain class of citizens for disfavored legal status. it appears doma will get tossed in the dust bin of history. the courts other gay rights case comes from california which gave gays the right to marry and then with proposition 8 took it away. taking away an existing right because of animus was prohibited by the court in a '96 decision authored by justice kennedy. but where the doma case asks can the federal government discriminate against married couple, the prop 8 case asks can states bar gays from marrying. kennedy